Chương 1
""Emma pressed the smiling-bear bandage above Lorenzo Duca’s bloody eyebrow with the solemn concentration of a child repairing a broken toy.
“Shh,” she whispered, lifting one small finger to her lips. “The lady upstairs said you’re already dead.”
Lorenzo’s eyes opened.
Not all the way. Just enough for the dark irises beneath his heavy lids to find the three-year-old kneeling between his shoes.
Thunder struck so hard the abandoned gardening shed seemed to tighten around them.
Emma did not jump. She had already been frightened too many times that evening, and fear, in a child, sometimes became something strangely practical. Her damp curls clung to her forehead beneath a crooked red bow. Mud darkened the hem of her burgundy dress. Her one-eyed stuffed rabbit lay beside a toy first-aid kit near Lorenzo’s knee.
Rain hammered the corrugated roof.
Lorenzo tried to sit straighter against the cracked potting bench. The movement pulled at the wound under his ribs. His jaw locked. A shallow breath escaped his nose.
Blood had soaked through the right side of his open white shirt and spread into the lining of his dark navy jacket. His skin had gone pale enough that the tattoos rising from his collar looked almost black.
“The lady,” he said.
His voice came out rougher than he intended.
Emma nodded.
“Upstairs?”
Another nod.
“Which lady?”
Emma frowned as if he had asked a very difficult question.
“The one with shiny shoes.”
Footsteps struck the concrete outside.
Not Emma’s.
Adult boots.
More than one pair.
Lorenzo’s right hand moved beneath his jacket.
A second hand caught his wrist before his fingers reached the pistol inside.
“No gun,” Claire Mercer said. “Not with my daughter here.”
She had come through the side door so quickly that rain still shone on her dark housekeeping uniform. Damp hair had pulled loose from the knot at the back of her head. Her chest rose hard from running, but her grip on Lorenzo’s wrist remained steady.
His eyes moved from her hand to her face.
Claire knew that look.
For four years she had worked inside homes where men lowered their voices when Lorenzo Duca entered a room. She had served coffee to elected officials who laughed too loudly at his jokes, changed sheets after people whose names never appeared on guest lists, and once found a kitchen porter crying behind the walk-in refrigerator because he had dropped a tray near Lorenzo’s uncle.
She had learned not to stare at the Ducas.
She stared now.
“If you pull that,” she said, “they’ll hear it.”
Lorenzo’s hand stopped fighting hers.
Outside, white flashlight beams slid across the warped boards of the shed wall.
Claire released him and immediately put two fingers against the side of his neck.
Emma copied her from the other side, placing two tiny fingers on Lorenzo’s jaw instead of his pulse.
“Mama,” she whispered. “His heart is running.”
Claire looked toward the wall, where another flashlight beam crossed the first.
“Then we keep it running.”
A dog barked somewhere beyond the shed.
Close.
Lorenzo’s breathing changed.
Claire noticed because she had spent two years in nursing school before tuition, pregnancy, and her mother’s stroke had reorganized her life without asking permission. She knew the difference between panic and physical decline. Lorenzo was doing neither dramatically. He simply took less air each time.
She pulled his jacket open.
“Where?”
“Right side.”
“I can see that.”
“Bullet.”
“In?”
“Out.”
“You sure?”
He gave her a look that might once have frightened a room.
Claire lifted the soaked edge of his shirt.
The bullet had torn through flesh along his lower ribs rather than crossing his abdomen. That was the first good thing she had seen since finding Emma missing from the mansion’s laundry room six minutes earlier. The second good thing was that the bleeding, while serious, did not appear arterial.
The bad things remained numerous.
“How long ago?”
“Twenty minutes.”
“You’ve been bleeding twenty minutes?”
“I’ve been busy.”
“You’re very funny.”
“I’m told.”
Emma pressed the plastic stethoscope from her toy kit against his sleeve.
Claire took the blood-soaked towel lying beside him and shoved it firmly against the wound.
Lorenzo inhaled through his teeth.
“Hold that.”
“I am holding it.”
“With pressure.”
“I know what pressure is.”
“Apparently not enough.”
He looked at her again.
Claire had imagined herself speaking to Lorenzo Duca many times over the years. Usually the fantasy involved quitting in his dining room and telling him exactly what she thought of the people who came through that house at two in the morning.
None of the fantasies had included her scolding him about wound compression while her daughter treated his elbow with a plastic stethoscope.
The dog barked again.
Closer.
A male voice carried through the rain.
“Check the greenhouse.”
Another answered, “Already did.”
Light flickered under the shed door.
Lorenzo lowered his voice.
“They find me, they kill you.”
Claire’s hands did not stop.
“You think I needed that explained?”
“They saw you leave the house?”
“I don’t know.”
“You came after her?”
Claire glanced at Emma.
Emma had found Lorenzo because she had followed drops of blood across a service corridor, through the old vegetable garden, and into a structure she had been told three separate times never to enter.
The child was holding three of Lorenzo’s fingers now.
He seemed not to know what to do about it.
“Yes,” Claire said. “I came after her.”
Lorenzo looked toward the door.
“You need to take her and run.”
“Where?”
He did not answer.
The estate covered thirteen fenced acres outside Greenwich, Connecticut. The main drive was watched. The staff entrance was watched. A storm had dropped branches across the service road. Whoever was searching the grounds had dogs and radios.
Claire saw the calculation happening behind Lorenzo’s half-closed eyes.
Then she saw something else.
Recognition.
He was looking past her.
May you like
At the potting bench.
It was an old oak worktable scarred by decades of knives, soil, spilled fertilizer, and neglect. The Ducas had stopped using the shed long before Claire was hired. Garden equipment had moved to a steel utility building near the tennis courts.
